Develop Reference

Is there a simple way to check if a mail backend is valid in Django without sending a mail?

In my tool the users can provide a mail backend using certain infos on a model and send their mails via the backend which gets created from those values. This all works, but I would love to have a quick check if the provided backend actually will work before using it. Using something like this check_mail_connection doesn't work as this actually returns False even though I entered valid connection parameters.
from django.core.mail import get_connection
class User(models.Model):
...
def get_mail_connection(self, fail_silently=False)
return get_connection(host=self.email_host,
port=self.email_port,
username=self.email_username,
password=self.email_password ... )
def check_mail_connection(self) -> bool:
from socket import error as socket_error
from smtplib import SMTP, SMTPConnectError
smtp = SMTP(host=self.email_host, port=self.email_port)
try:
smtp.connect()
return True
except SMTPConnectError:
return False
except socket_error:
return False
I don't want to send a test mail to confirm, as this can easily get lost or fail on a different part of the system. This feature is for sending out emails from the users mail servers, as I suspect most of my users have a mail server anyways and I basically offer white labeling and similar stuff to them.

You have the following line smtp.connect() in your code that attempts to make a connection. If you look at the documentation for smtplib the signature for this method is:
SMTP.connect(host='localhost', port=0)
Meaning you are trying to connect to localhost with port 25 (standard SMTP port). Of course there is no server listening there and you get a ConnectionRefusedError which you catch and return False. In fact you don't even need to call connect because the documentation states:
If the optional host and port parameters are given, the SMTP
connect() method is called with those parameters during
initialization.
Hence you can simply write:
def check_mail_connection(self) -> bool:
from smtplib import SMTP
try:
smtp = SMTP(host=self.email_host, port=self.email_port)
return True
except OSError:
return False
You can also simply use the open method of the email backend's instance rather than creating the SMTP instance and calling connect yourself:
def check_mail_connection(self) -> bool:
try:
email_backend = self.get_mail_connection()
silent_exception = email_backend.open() is None
email_backend.close()
return not silent_exception
except OSError:
return False

I have a few questions for you and would like for you to answer these questions before we can go further.
What type of OS are you running the server on?
What mail client and tutorial did you follow? Postfix?
Can a user on the server send local mail to another user on the server?
What ports are open and what type of security features do you have installed?
What did your logs say when the email failed?
Are you self hosting/ are you acting as the server admin?
(It's fine if this is your first time. Everyone had a first day.)
SSL and A FQDN isn't too important if your just sending mail out. The system will still work, you just won't be able to receive mail.
(I'm talking from the sense of making sure it at least will send an email. You should at least use SSL as it can be gotten for free.)
If you checked all of these things, there is a part of the mail client that you are using and it probably won't send mail out unless it has approval. There are a lot of variables.
All of these things matter or it wont work.
Sorry meant to make this as a comment. I'm not use to speaking on here.

How to keep paramiko ssh session open after loggin in using python?

I am trying to ssh to a test cisco router in a test environment using python paramiko, and run cisco commands in that test router.
Everything works great except for 1 small detail.
After running the script I want the ssh session to remain open. (so I can run other commands manually).
I want to keep the ssh session open until I type "exit"
I found another link with a similar issue but I cant understand the solution.
(See here Python ssh - keep connection open after script terminates)
I would appreciate if someone can help me out here
My code
import paramiko
import time
def ssh_session(ip):
try:
session = paramiko.SSHClient() #Open the session
session.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
session.connect(ip, username = "ciscouser1", password = "password")
connection = session.invoke_shell()
####Running Cisco IOS commands###
connection.send("enable\n")
connection.send("password1") #sending
connection.send("\n")
connection.send("configure terminal\n\n")
time.sleep(1)
connection.send("do show ip int brief\n")
time.sleep(1)
except paramiko.AuthenticationException:
print "wrong credentials"
ssh_session("10.10.10.1")

The session timeout would be controlled by the SSH server. To the best of my knowledge, the only way to keep your session alive on the client side is to not be inactive, which can be accomplished by sending null packets. As to how to do this specifically with paramiko I am not certain. Perhaps you could send some kind of dummy command (or maybe even an empty string?) every so often?

SMTP - Fast and reliable connection probing without auth?

Briefing
I am currently building a python SMTP Mail sender program.
I added a feature so that the user would not be able to log in if there was no active internet connection, I tried many solutions/variations to make the real time connection checking as swift as possible, there were many problems such as:
The thread where the connection handler was running suddenly lagged when I pulled out the ethernet cable ( to test how it would handle the sudden disconnect )
The whole program crashed
It took several seconds for the program to detect the change
My current solution
I set up a data handling class which would contain all the necessary info ( the modules needed to share info effectively )
import smtplib
from socket import gaierror, timeout
class DataHandler:
is_logged_in = None
is_connected = None
server_conn = None
user_address = ''
user_passwd = ''
#staticmethod
def try_connect():
try:
DataHandler.server_conn = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587, timeout=1) # The place where the connection is checked
DataHandler.is_connected = True
except (smtplib.SMTPException, gaierror, timeout):
DataHandler.is_connected = False # Connection status changed upon a connection error
I put a connection handler class on a second thread, the server connection process slowed down the gui when it was all on one thread.
from root_gui import Root
import threading
from time import sleep
from data_handler import DataHandler
def handle_conn():
DataHandler.try_connect()
smtp_client.refresh() # Refreshes the gui according to the current status
def conn_manager(): # Working pretty well
while 'smtp_client' in globals():
sleep(0.6)
try:
handle_conn() # Calls the connection
except NameError: # If the user quits the tkinter gui
break
smtp_client = Root()
handle_conn()
MyConnManager = threading.Thread(target=conn_manager)
MyConnManager.start()
smtp_client.mainloop()
del smtp_client # The connection manager will detect this and stop running
My question is:
Is this a good practice or a terrible waste of resources? Is there a better way to do this because no matter what I tried, this was the only solution that worked.
From what I know the try_connect() function creates a completely new smtp object each time it is run ( which is once in 0.6 seconds! )
Resources/observations
The project on git: https://github.com/cernyd/smtp_client
Observation: the timeout parameter when creating the smtp object improved response times drastically, why is that so?

Python 3 Read data from URL [duplicate]

I have this simple minimal 'working' example below that opens a connection to google every two seconds. When I run this script when I have a working internet connection, I get the Success message, and when I then disconnect, I get the Fail message and when I reconnect again I get the Success again. So far, so good.
However, when I start the script when the internet is disconnected, I get the Fail messages, and when I connect later, I never get the Success message. I keep getting the error:
urlopen error [Errno -2] Name or service not known
What is going on?
import urllib2, time
while True:
try:
print('Trying')
response = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.google.com')
print('Success')
time.sleep(2)
except Exception, e:
print('Fail ' + str(e))
time.sleep(2)

This happens because the DNS name "www.google.com" cannot be resolved. If there is no internet connection the DNS server is probably not reachable to resolve this entry.
It seems I misread your question the first time. The behaviour you describe is, on Linux, a peculiarity of glibc. It only reads "/etc/resolv.conf" once, when loading. glibc can be forced to re-read "/etc/resolv.conf" via the res_init() function.
One solution would be to wrap the res_init() function and call it before calling getaddrinfo() (which is indirectly used by urllib2.urlopen().
You might try the following (still assuming you're using Linux):
import ctypes
libc = ctypes.cdll.LoadLibrary('libc.so.6')
res_init = libc.__res_init
# ...
res_init()
response = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.google.com')
This might of course be optimized by waiting until "/etc/resolv.conf" is modified before calling res_init().
Another solution would be to install e.g. nscd (name service cache daemon).

For me, it was a proxy problem.
Running the following before import urllib.request helped
import os
os.environ['http_proxy']=''
response = urllib.request.urlopen('http://www.google.com')

Receiving email with SMTPServer in python:

I have a small application under Linux to receive an email with the use of smtpd.SMTPServer. Here is the small test code:
class CustomSMTPServer(smtpd.SMTPServer):
def process_message(self, peer, mailfrom, rcpttos, data):
print 'Receiving message from:', peer
print 'Message addressed from:', mailfrom
print 'Message addressed to :', rcpttos
print 'Message length :', len(data)
return
server = CustomSMTPServer(('0.0.0.0', 25), None)
asyncore.loop()
I have the following issues:
(1) When using this piece of code, the computer sending the email gets the following message:
502 Error: command "EHLO" not implemented
so the server cannot reply correctly to receive further data / communicate with the email-sending computer (which I assume is the client).
Shouldn't such a basic thing like EHLO be implemented in a Ubuntu installation in the first place? Why is it not implemented?
(2) I figured that EHLO can be installed by installing postfix in Ubuntu. I did that and the same test call went on, but stopped later with a different error:
Client: RCPT TO: XXX#YYY.com
Server: 554 5.7.1 <XXX#YYY>: Relay access denied
(3) At later times, after doing some more other tests, I got the error from the test code itself:
error: [Errno 98] Address already in use
It turns out that the used IP address was already in use as could be seen with
netstat -lnpt
of which the case was the running postfix. After stopping the postfix service the address was no longer in use, but of course it was back to issue #1:
502 Error: command "EHLO" not implemented
I would like to be able to use a SMTPServer to receive an email message
1. without the need to install postfix
2. with the use of asyncore
If there are any ideas of how to make this possible in an easy and simple way using python libraries that would be great!
Cheers
Alex

1) Postfix is an SMTP server, it has nothing to do with python's smtpd EHLO implementation. If you want your custom SMTP server, you don't need postfix, so feel free to remove it.
2) EHLO is a ESMTP command, not SMTP, standard smtpd python module implements SMTP, therefore it doesn't have an EHLO implementation.

Try this.
Of course, it does not implement the EHLO command, but makes it treat it the same as the HELO command. Of course, it might only get you past the first stumbling block, however if the rest of the smtp commands are compatible it might get you by:
You will probably find the smtpd.py file in /usr/lib/python2.7
def smtp_HELO(self, arg):
if not arg:
self.push('501 Syntax: HELO hostname')
return
if self.__greeting:
self.push('503 Duplicate HELO/EHLO')
else:
self.__greeting = arg
self.push('250 %s' % self.__fqdn)
#copy the above function and rename it smtp_EHLO
def smtp_EHLO(self, arg):
if not arg:
self.push('501 Syntax: HELO hostname')
return
if self.__greeting:
self.push('503 Duplicate HELO/EHLO')
else:
self.__greeting = arg
self.push('250 %s' % self.__fqdn)
Also, I note the python3.5 version of the same library looks like it supports EHLO, so maybe you could try and use python3. But apparently python3 is not backwards compatible it seems - so good luck.